


light will lead the way

by chrysanthe (sonderesque)



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Character Study, M/M, Moving In Together, but have you Seen him in the manga?, he's graceful yes, keiji has a minor (major?) life crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:35:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25966726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonderesque/pseuds/chrysanthe
Summary: in which some things cannot be planned for (or: Akaashi Keiji breaks something and quite literally picks up the pieces)
Relationships: Akaashi Keiji/Bokuto Koutarou
Comments: 1
Kudos: 40





	light will lead the way

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from: Shine a Light by Banners

The move into Koutarou’s apartment is less of a move and more like that one time Koutarou tried carrying all the dishes from the dishwasher to his cabinets all in one massive trip. Keiji did warn him, but Koutarou with his fearless propensity for trying things with high risk of failure, took it more as a suggestion rather than an order. Mugs full of utensils teetered on fragile plates placed in cooking pans. Towering fragile things made a pilgrimage of the most uncomfortable four feet traversed in front of his eyes. 

All things considered, Keiji should have stopped him. Yet he wanted to see what would happen, if it would work. Something about Koutarou has always made Keiji wonder if anything he did would work, but only because it was Koutarou himself who sought to chase after the task.

That is to say, when Koutarou asked Keiji to move in with him, Keiji immediately agreed.

With his own clear aversion in taking an uncertain path without thinking things through, moving in goes against so many of his well thought out plans that it’s as if he hadn’t made plans to begin with. Keiji, in contrast to Koutarou, has a predisposition in watching every single detail to the point of overcompensation. Contingency plans for contingency plans. Covering for every possible mistake just in case. Here it goes: in which tenuous balance is achieved and the dishes are in a perpetual state of Shrodinger’s collapse. The shoe is going to drop. Plummet from the sky.

In fairness, it’s not that moving his boxes into the apartment is by any means difficult. If anything, Keiji doesn’t pack very much to begin with, so stacking all the boxes near the entrance takes less time than either of them anticipated. It’s when Keiji and Koutarou begin taking the items in the boxes out that it really strikes him. His books will be next to Koutarou’s magazine. His shoes will be next to Koutarou’s shoes. His mason jar of tea bags will be next to Koutarou’s coffee grounds. Using Koutarou’s light bulbs for his lamp because the fancy ones he ordered haven't come in yet. 

Carving a place for himself within these walls-- the thought trembles in his hands. Plates lean to the side as if yearning to kiss the ground. He never planned to fit around another person, to make a home for himself in someone else’s home. One day, he’ll eventually be able to call this place that does not wholly belong to him his. Keiji hadn’t made a contingency plan for inconvenient realizations and crises for situations without an undo button. There was no planning for this. And yet, here he is. What is he _doing_?

Keiji drops a lightbulb. 

It shatters. 

He blinks at the wreckage, like staring at the end credits of a movie without even knowing what the entire movie was about. Glass glittering under the living room lights. Plates toppling like empires. His hands don’t feel like his own. “That was an accident,” he says faintly. A ghost on his tongue. Shame feels just as sharp as the shattered glass.

Koutarou comes rushing in from the other side of the kitchen counter. He had been placing Keiji’s mugs right next to his own on the shelf. “It’s fine Keiji! Don’t pick it up; you’ll cut your fingers.” Koutarou’s hand rests gently atop Keiji’s own fingers, stopping him from reaching out to pick up the pieces with his bare hands. 

Keiji shakes his head, looking away from him. He doesn’t pull his hand free though. “You don’t need to clean it up. I’m the one who broke it.” 

“Unpacking is a lot of hard work.” Koutarou’s free hand, the one that isn’t curled around Keiji’s, reaches to touch his cheek and nudges him to look back. Ochre irises gleam, understanding in the lines of a soft smile. “Let me help you,” he says.

_Let me help you,_ he says, as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. As if this in itself is not a high risk, something waiting to break. 

Keiji inhales, exhales slowly. Trust. This will work out somehow. It will, he tries to convince himself. He nods, _okay._ Koutarou leads him to a closet nearby, passing Keiji a brush and a dust pan and taking a thick winter glove for himself along with a box for the glass.

“It feels a little like a bad omen,” he mumbles as they clean up.

At the start of something new, no less. This could be the foretelling of some apocalyptic future. Falling plates frozen still in the air. The shoe only centimeters from the ground. Keiji cannot anticipate the full berth of the future, can only brace himself for the incoming impact. An earth-shattering revelation in which everything comes crashing down.

“The lightbulb?” 

“I could be cursed.”

“You’re not cursed. If it’s broken, we’ll fix it. If we can’t fix it, then we’ll make something new,” Koutarou cheerfully exclaims, picking up the last of the large shards. Keiji glances up at him, eyes wide. He looks up and grins at Keiji’s startled look. “It’s as simple as that! And everyone thinks I’m the handful.” Koutarou shakes his head jokingly, laughter threatening to spill out as the corner of his mouth twitches up.

“Because you are,” he deapans in a teasing manner. He is too, in his own way. 

The rest of the tiny fragments of glass are swept up, and they store the shards safely away in a cardboard box and put it under the sink. No sign of glittering sharpness against dark wood. There, it’s safe now. Koutarou hands him another container for the lightbulbs. Turning back to the kitchen, he hums as he puts away the rest of the crockery. Keiji takes a second to look at him under the glow of the kitchen lights, luminous and almost impossible to touch. He could touch him if he really wanted to.

Perhaps there was never truly a plan to begin with; only this: the immovable shining of the star that is Bokuto Koutarou. Here is the belief that Koutarou could make anything work just because it was him who yearned for it, who willed it into existence. Dishes, in all of its fragile Jenga structure, make it where it’s supposed to go. Keiji, a little lost and still floundering, will make it where he’s supposed to go. 

This time, he doesn’t break the lightbulb. This time, he screws it into the lamp.

Keiji turns the light on.

**Author's Note:**

> I tend to see that in a lot of fanfics Akaashi's seen as this graceful, mysterious character. He is fairly aloof in canon as well, but a part that really made me see him differently was during and after a certain match where he showed that he's not as unflappable as he seems on the surface. That's not to say it's a facade or anything, because that is what he's like, but I also wanted to show another side of him here.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
